to that which is neither knowledge nor science, the all-powerful
passion of Love--probably the most universal fount and origin of
poetry since the human race began to express its thoughts and feelings
at all. Coleridge enlarges Wordsworth's phrase, and makes poetry "the
blossom and fragrance of all human knowledge, human thought, human
passions, emotions, language." This is fine; yet it is but a figure,
denoting the themes and ignoring the form of poetic production.

Quaint old Thomas Fuller gives a pretty simile when he says that
"Poetry is music in words, and music is poetry in sound"; and, in
so far as melodious form and harmonious thought express and arouse
emotion, he gives a hint of the truth.

The German Jean Paul Richter says an admirable thing: "There are so
many tender and holy emotions flying about in our inward world, which,
like angels, can never assume the body of an outward act; so many
rich and lovely flowers spring up, which bear no seed, that it is
a happiness poetry was invented, which receives into its limbus all
these incorporeal spirits, and the perfume of all these flowers."
True: but the tremendous domain of Tragedy--emotion neither holy nor
tender--has been most fruitful of poetic power, and that finds here no
recognition.

Edmund Burke's rather disparaging remark that poetry is "the art of
substituting shadows, and of lending existence to nothing," has yet a
vital suggestion, reminding one of Shakespeare's graphic touch in "The
Tempest":

"And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen